Do Some Lives Matter Less?

[Keith Maitland]

Not to lessen the horror that befell Paris, but there were attacks in Beirut and Baghdad last week that combined equaled the numbers of dead and injured in Paris. Those Arab incidents received 0.01% of the Paris attack press coverage and given the feeling of just another day.

A life is a life is a life. Unfortunately, ground troops will be needed, but under no conditions should these captive ISIS prisoners be contained in Arab-controlled prisons, which are famous for escapes.

How about life sentences to be served on remote Antarctic islands? This section of the world hasn't had a jihad since before the dinosaur age!!

[Bubbles]

Not to lessen the horror that befell Paris, but there were attacks in Beirut and Baghdad last week that combined equaled the numbers of dead and injured in Paris. Those Arab incidents received 0.01% of the Paris attack press coverage and given the feeling of just another day.

A life is a life is a life. Unfortunately, ground troops will be needed, but under no conditions should these captive ISIS prisoners be contained in Arab-controlled prisons, which are famous for escapes.

How about life sentences to be served on remote Antarctic islands? This section of the world hasn't had a jihad since before the dinosaur age!!

No, all lives matter but Paris is closer than some other places. Being closer and more unusual  makes people pay more attention.

It's like local news, people pay more attention, it depends how bad the news is, as to the distance it shocks people.

Perhaps we get complacent about events far away that happen a lot.




Also killings like that  are less common in Paris, than in other places.

I think it is human to respond when we feel we have a link of some kind to the victims, rather than being in a place far away with people we don't know.

It might also be, that the media tends to report on local news in a different way ( France being more local and this sort of killings being more unusual than Bagdad)

 I don't think anyone can take on all the worries of the world, I think our brains shut out a lot of horrors and focus on those that resonate with us or that are brought to our attention in some way.

What an individual can do to stop world issues is fairly limited, so I think,  no matter how well intentioned someone is, I think you can't be fighting on all fronts all the time.

Lots of people pick a few injustices and try and make a difference to a few people's lives rather than take on too much.

It doesn't mean the people they can't or have chosen not to help,  are worth less.

[Outrider]

Do they matter, individually, yes. Do they constitute News to the Western media to the same extent, no.

The Barbarians killing each other on properly foreign shores isn't news, but barbarians killing people in France (which isn't us, obviously, but it's enough like us that we can pretend like we're distressed by the minor differences) that's news. It's this mentality that makes me wish one of these places would bomb the Daily Mail, except that they realise what the Daily Mail doesn't, which is that they are helping foment the culture-clash mentality that feeds the warmongering.

O.

[Hope]

Do they matter, individually, yes. Do they constitute News to the Western media to the same extent, no.

The Barbarians killing each other on properly foreign shores isn't news, but barbarians killing people in France (which isn't us, obviously, but it's enough like us that we can pretend like we're distressed by the minor differences) that's news. It's this mentality that makes me wish one of these places would bomb the Daily Mail, except that they realise what the Daily Mail doesn't, which is that they are helping foment the culture-clash mentality that feeds the warmongering.

O.

Good comment, O.

[Nearly Sane]

I have already posted my thoughts on this on other thread so i'll share this instead.

https://www.the-pool.com/news-views/opinion/2015/46/sali-hughes-on-the-paris-attacks

[Humph Warden Bennett]

Not to lessen the horror that befell Paris, but there were attacks in Beirut and Baghdad last week that combined equaled the numbers of dead and injured in Paris. Those Arab incidents received 0.01% of the Paris attack press coverage and given the feeling of just another day.

A life is a life is a life. Unfortunately, ground troops will be needed, but under no conditions should these captive ISIS prisoners be contained in Arab-controlled prisons, which are famous for escapes.

How about life sentences to be served on remote Antarctic islands? This section of the world hasn't had a jihad since before the dinosaur age!!

I think the costs of building a prison in the Antarctic would be prohibitive. I did read somewhere that Argentina sent some colonists to Antarctica in the late seventies/early eighties, to see if the continent was suitable for some kind of human colonisation, the conclusion was that whilst the peninsula (if not the mainland) could support a few small towns, political considerations were such that such action would be too controversial.